


Emotions and Emoticons

by CaremKefo



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Cell Phones, Emoticons, M/M, Mark of Cain, Post-Episode: s10e10 The Hunter Games, Texting, emojis
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-03
Updated: 2015-03-03
Packaged: 2018-03-16 05:12:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,404
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3475733
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CaremKefo/pseuds/CaremKefo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Castiel likes texting. Emoticons. Emojis.</p><p>And Dean.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Emotions and Emoticons

**Author's Note:**

> ~~Unbeta'd.~~
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> Now beta'd by the wonderful [Lauren](http://destielintheimpala.tumblr.com/)!

If Cas hadn't declared his love of emoticons in the bunker, Dean thinks he could have figured it out. After all, Cas ends every text with a **:)** or a **;)** or a **:p** , and sometimes his replies are only emoticons, like that time Cas asked how they were, and Dean told him that they were fine but one of his favourite shirts was trashed, and all Cas said - or didn't say - in return was **:(**. Dean doesn't see the point in emoticons, really, until the day he gets a text from Cas informing him that he'd just run over a rabbit on the way to the bunker. The message ended with a **:'(** that had Dean shouting at Sam that Cas had got a flat and he'd be back, before getting in the Impala and tearing thirty miles up the highway and turning off onto a country road to find an upset Cas cradling the damn bunny corpse.

"It was only a rabbit," he says softly.

"But it didn't need to die."

Dean opens and closes his mouth. "Everything dies."

"But it didn't _need_ to. Not now."

Cas looks so distraught that Dean drapes an arm around him. "This isn't about the rabbit, is it?"

Cas sucks in a shaky breath. "What if I've broken Heaven so much that I can't fix it?" he asks, unable to look Dean in the eye. He rests a hand on Dean's arm, and the Mark seems to burn hotter under his touch. "What if I can't fix _you_?"

"You'll do your best, because that's all you _can_ do. And as for me, well, that's not on you. _I'm_ not on you." Dean stands up and opens the Impala's trunk, retrieving a shovel.

"What are you doing?"

"We're gonna bury the rabbit, then we're driving home."

Cas smiles, then.

* * *

Twenty minutes later Dean is throwing the shovel back into the trunk and slamming it shut. "We good to go?"

"Yes."

"Okay. And for the record, I told Sam you had a flat."

"A flat?"

"Tyre, Cas."

"Why would you do that?"

"To explain me running out of the bunker like a man possessed."

Cas smiles again. "You can't be possessed. You have an anti-possession tattoo."

"Ha ha ha," Dean grins dryly.

"You lead," Cas instructs, motioning towards the Impala. "I'll follow."

Dean has barely buckled his seatbelt when his phone chirps.

**From: Cas  
Thank you.  <3**

Dean squints at what looked like a double scoop ice cream cone. Opening up the browser app, he quickly copies the emoticon into the search bar. The first result is from an online forum of some kind - 'Q: What does <3 signify? A: That's a heart!' - and he blushes. Does Cas know what it means?

Of course he does.

Tossing his phone onto the passenger seat he checks his rearview mirror, seeing Cas patiently waiting in the driver's seat of his pimpmobile for him to drive off, before setting off to join the main road.

* * *

Several days later Dean's phone chirps for the third time in as many minutes. He picks it up from where it is lying, face up, beside the book on tattoos that he's studying.

"Are you on another dating app?" Sam teases, looking up from the book he's reading.

Dean blushes. "No!" He clears his throat, realising he's spoken too quickly to look innocent. He doesn't have any need to be on a dating app, anyway – not any more. "No, it's, uh, Cas. He likes texting, remember?"

"Well you can tell him he's allowed to text me, too. I mean, he _has_ got my number."

"Yeah," Dean says, distracted. "I'll tell him." He squints at his screen. He's used to Cas sending him little messages, or just a new emoticon he's learned, but today… He knocks his phone against the table.

"Dean, what the hell?"

"I think my phone's broken."

"Well it will be if you keep banging it like that. Let me see." Sam takes the phone from Dean and examines it. "What do you think's wrong with it?"

Dean clenches his teeth so hard his jaw twitches. "Cas likes to send those... What do you call them? Emoticons?" he blusters, knowing damn well what they're called because he'd spent half an hour on the phone the other night listening to Cas rave about humanity after discovering that there were emoticons for sexual organs.

"Emoticons, yeah," Sam agrees absently.

Standing behind Sam, he leans over his brother's shoulder trying too hard to appear casual. "What are you doing?"

"I'm trying to see if there are any settings I can change," his brother frowns.

Dean doesn't know how to tell him not to read his messages without sounding like he has something to hide, so keeps his mouth shut.

"It's not your phone, Dean," Sam announces eventually. "And that's not an emoticon."

"It's not? Then what is it? It's not some kind of virus, is it?" He has a lot of photos on his phone - specifically, a lot of photos of _Cas_ \- that he doesn't want to lose.

Sam shakes his head and smiles. "No. I think it's just an emoji."

"Is that bad?"

"No!" Sam laughs.

"Then what the fuck is in a emoji?"

"It's a pictorial icon, rather than a 'smilie', or emoticon, made from punctuation mark and other typographical marks."

Dean stares at Sam as if he'd just spoken Greek. "What?"

"A picture," his brother surmises with a sigh.

"Nah, I get them. Cas sends them all the time. Little happy faces and that."

"No, you get a text emoticon that can be translated into a pictorial equivalent - happy faces, sad faces, crying faces, winking faces, faces blowing kisses..."

"Okay, Cas does not send me kisses!" Dean protests gruffly.

"... I never said he did."

"You didn't?"

"No."

"Oh."

Sam takes a breath. "But you get the idea. They can look different on different phones, but emojis don't have a text equivalent so can't be reverse translated, therefore you get a blank square."

"So how do I know what he sent?"

"Ask him," Sam states, returning his attention to his book. "Or buy a new phone."

He isn't going to buy a new phone just because Cas had discovered _emojis_. It'd be a waste of money (even if it technically isn't _his_ money he'd be wasting, given the name on his current credit card reads _Enrique Banderas_ ). Most messages still end with emoticons, so he's sure Cas will get tired of emojis in time.

* * *

Six weeks later Dean's beginning to realise he's got Cas all wrong, because the emojis are becoming more and more frequent and the emoticons are coming few and far between.

"Dude," he finally asks one day when Cas is about to leave the bunker, "what's with the emoji things you keep sending me?"

Dean's sure he imagines the light blush creeping across Cas's face, because fading grace or not Cas is still an angel and angels don't blush. _Just like angels don't rebel against Heaven,_ a smartass little voice in his head adds.

"I hoped you wouldn't be angry or upset with me. Then I thought it made sense that you ignored it altogether - you don't believe you deserve to be cared about; to be cared _for_."

"Cas, what the hell are you talking about?"

Cas squints in the way that only Cas can as he tries to decipher what Dean isn't saying. "What are _you_ talking about?" he settles for eventually.

"The little rectangles I keep getting because you send me emojis, which Sam tells me my phone isn't capable of reading."

Cas's confusion immediately clears and he schools his expression into one of neutrality, hiding his emotions. "You can't see them," he states, with dawning realisation. While his face remains expressionless, the sadness in his eyes betrays his feelings. Castiel's eyes have always been an open book to Dean.

"Well, no," he admits, one hand rubbing across the nape of his neck. Despite his discomfort with the unexpectedly emotional turn their conversation seems to be taking, he needs to know what the symbols are supposed to be.

"It is not of import," Cas responds.

Now the last time Cas had spoken like that he'd been a full-blown angel. "Talk to me," he urges him.

Castiel smiles, but it's not the rare smile that causes his whole face to light up: this one is sad and twists Dean's insides into knots. "There is no need."

Castiel has to leave, then, if he wants to reach his destination before sundown.

"Cas," Dean calls after him as he gets into that awful pimpmobile the angel adores. "Text me, okay?" _Let me know you arrive safe._

The angel nods, once, before setting off down the road.

Dean watches him leave until the car is out of sight.

* * *

Dean ponders the mystery of Castiel's messages for the next few days, wondering why Cas had felt like it was something he couldn't share in words. His curiosity burns under his skin like an itch he can't reach to scratch, until finally he caves and buys a new phone.

He is served by a teenage boy with braces and a bad case of acne who looks barely old enough to be out of diapers. As he leaves, he overhears the kid who'd served him refer to him as _'that old grandpa trying to get down with the kids'_ to his pretty female colleague. He has to clench his hand over the Mark to stop from turning around and marching straight back in there, afraid of what he'll do if he gets angry.

This is exactly the reason he's been so reluctant to leave the bunker lately.

The Mark seems to latch onto his insecurities and use them, twisting them until they become anger and using them to feed the hunger.

* * *

With a little bit of help from Sam he gets his new phone up and running, and he fires off a quick text to Cas.

**To: Cas  
Hey, buddy. Where you at?**

Within seconds he gets a reply telling him that Cas is actually on his way back to the bunker, and instead of the usual empty rectangle he sees a big red heart.

Shit.

He'd be lying if he said that his conversations with Cas hadn't taken a more _intimate_ turn in recent weeks. Hell, things have been hovering between friendly and flirtatious for months - he's just never had to think about what it would mean because it's never been the right time for anything. After Purgatory there had been the trials, then the angels had fallen and Sam had gotten sick, then Abaddon and now the Mark that taints his skin. Even without something big to focus on, the Winchester lifestyle can be long periods of just getting from one day to the next.

But even with all the shit they're dealing with right now - all the shit Dean's burdened them with - somehow seeing the heart emoji feels more _real_ than the ice cream cone looking emoticon.

**To: Cas  
Alright. C U soon.**

They've never had the luxury of time to spend on figuring out whatever the hell their friendship was becoming, but it looks like whatever it is has snuck up on them and they're already there.

* * *

"Why don't we see about getting you a room, yeah?" Dean announces after dinner, standing up and trying to lead Castiel down the corridor to the bedrooms.

"But I don't need to sleep."

Dean falters. "Well, yeah, I know, but you should have your own room. If anything so that you've got something... somewhere to come back to." He casts a glance at Sam, but his geek brother's too focused on some old file to pay him much attention.

For a moment Castiel looks like he wants to argue, but after a moment's hesitation he stands and follows Dean down the corridor.

"So I got a new phone," Dean tells him once they're out of Sam's earshot. "It displays emojis."

He hears Castiel's footsteps stop for a second, before they resume following him.

"I think that even if you don't use it all that often, you should still have somewhere that's _yours_ ," he continues. "Your own space."

"Thank you, Dean."

"Sam and me are down the corridor," Dean tells him, opening a door. "You can put stuff up on the walls if you want. Pictures or some shit, I don't care. It's your room, now. Somewhere to come home to." He knows he's said that already. "Because you're family, and the bunker should be as much _your_ home as it is mine and Sam's. And, uh, you know you've got some _one_ to come home to here, as well."

Castiel's eyes widen in response to what he's just said, but Dean doesn't want to dwell on it. Not yet, anyway. He's not ready.

"You should take a look round. Settle in," he tells him, already walking back to Sam. Back to safety, where they couldn't talk openly about whatever had changed between them.

* * *

Cas goes and comes and goes again as often as he always does, and he continues to text Dean random facts about his travels.

**09/25/14**

**To: Dean  
I rescued a prairie dog today. It was stuck in the entrance to its burrow. ♥**

**11/07/14**

**To: Dean  
It has rained for three days straight. Perhaps I need to travel with spare clothes. ♥**

**02/13/15**

**To: Dean  
I am sleeping in my car because the motel was full, and a stranger bought me a sandwich. ♥**

**To: Dean  
This sandwich taste like molecules. ♥**

Every message ends with a heart emoji that makes Dean feel like his is going to explode. On the one hand he's flustered that a freaking angel of the Lord appears to _like_ like him, and on the other he feels guilty that he isn't ready to think about whether he feels the same way. He almost feels like he's using Cas at times.

Their relationship progresses like this for several months, until one day Dean realises that he never wants Cas to leave.

**To: Cas  
Hey. I just wanted to tell you that I miss you. Come home soon.**

**To: Dean  
I'll be there in twenty minutes. Is that soon enough? :p ♥**

**To: Cas  
I'll be waiting. ♥**

Yes, every message from Cas ends with a heart, and he doesn't think he's ever seen Cas happier than the day he sends one back.


End file.
